Pyramid Quest (10 page)

Since the ancient high civilization that built the Giza death star was global in its reach, Farrell often cites evidence from beyond Egypt to support his argument. He turns, for example, to a mural on the Sun Gate in the ancient city of Tiwanaku, on the Bolivian shore of Lake Titicaca. Scholars consider this drawing a portrayal of the god Viracocha. Farrell, however, sees a simple schematic for a thermonuclear bomb, complete with the implosion detonator needed to set off the device and the casing of fissile material, like plutonium, surrounding it. When Farrell parses this image, he locates the fissile critical mass in the god’s eyes, the detonator in his headdress, and the fins in his feet.

Of course, we could all be missing something that Farrell has wisely and bravely perceived. But it is altogether more likely that he is seeing what he wants to. Like the neutral ink blots psychologists use to help patients project their deepest preoccupations and fears, the ancient world—and particularly the Great Pyramid of Giza—becomes a canvas on which modern writers project the key issues of their own time. Their work turns history into little more than a mirror image of themselves and their times.

Theories of the Great Pyramid as a razor blade preserver, water pump, electrical generator, nuclear fuel product facility, and long-range weapon of mass destruction reflect our world, not the ancient Egyptians’. The search for electrical and nuclear power for an energy-hungry civilization defined the technological growth of the twentieth century. Those same hundred years saw the bloodiest and most horrific wars of history, capped by the fiery destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The “discovery” of these same concerns and purposes in the ancient world points to a failure to see the civilization of long ago on its own terms.

Yet these same writers have done us a service, by helping to underscore the shortfalls of the orthodox theory of the Great Pyramid and to question when the monument was built, how, and by whom. The Great Pyramid is engineered to astounding precision, and at least the modern mechanistic, even if somewhat fantastical, theories attempt to account for this precision and exactness—something the standard theories fail to address. The pyramidological theories also question, either directly or indirectly, our understanding of the date and the builders of the Great Pyramid, subjects the traditional tomb theorists falsely assert have been resolved. Things are neither as clear nor definitive as modern academia would have it, and the pyramidologists are like gadflies—often fanciful, sometimes perceptive—who refuse to allow scholastic certainties to stand without challenge. If for no other reason, their ideas are worth considering.

A CERTAIN AGE

ACCORDING TO THE STANDARD STORY, KHUFU HAD AT least two good reasons for choosing Giza as the site for his Great Pyramid soon after he ascended the throne of the Two Lands in 2551 B.C. For one, the plateau provided a clean slate, an unused venue on the west bank of the Nile, the direction of the setting sun, that opened into the supernatural world of ancestors and gods. For another, Giza offered a nearby supply of workable limestone to build the core of the pyramid, as well as a firm foundation of bedrock to support the immense weight of this massive monument. Having made his choice, Khufu put his people to work. The project was massive, according to the much later account of Herodotus, who wrote that construction cost the Egyptians the work of 100,000 men over a 20-year period. The structure was completed before Khufu died in 2528 B.C., and, according to the conventional view, his mummy should have been laid to rest in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid.

Although this story builds upon an ego of unusual grandeur, it is remarkable how little we actually know of Khufu. Few written records have survived from his reign, and the only surviving image of this pharaoh of all pharaohs is a 2½-inch tall ivory statuette uncovered by the famous Egyptologist Sir Flinders Petrie, not at Giza but at Abydos, in 1909. (Other images of Khufu have been reported but are lost. Petrie himself told of a likeness of Khufu carved into a cliff in the Sinai, but it was smashed when ancient turquoise mines in the area were reopened for exploitation at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.) In fact, apart from the account of Herodotus, written more than two millennia after the fact, the primary evidence at Giza linking the Great Pyramid to Khufu consists of nearby tombs and other structures dated to his reign, and a few graffiti within the body of the monument itself. These graffiti form the basis of a fascinating story, one that leads to as many questions as answers.

To get the full measure of this story, we have to return to the time when the gentlemen of the British Empire considered the colonial world their nut to crack with cheap native labor and abundant gunpowder. Richard William Howard Vyse (1784-1853) was one of these imperial gentlemen.

Howard Vyse had unimpeachable blue-blood credentials. The son of General Richard Vyse and a grandson of Field Marshal Sir George Howard, Vyse rose through the ranks of the officer corps, ultimately becoming a general. Vyse served for a time under Wellington, and, like Wellington, he was described as artless and thorough. Those qualities proved useful when he came to work on the Great Pyramid.

Vyse arrived in Egypt in the 1830s as a tourist, but he soon became serious about understanding the mysteries of the pyramids’ meaning and construction. At the time, a former sea captain from Genoa named Giovanni Battista Caviglia (1770-1845) was exploring Giza, seeking secret rooms inside the Great Pyramid and spinning theories about the hermetic purposes of the structure. Caviglia was said to be so devoted to his work that he took up residence inside the Great Pyramid in the first Relieving Chamber above the King’s Chamber after he swept out several centuries’ accumulation of bat guano. At the time, the first Relieving Chamber was the only one that had been discovered. Then and now it is called Davison’s Chamber, after Nathaniel Davison, a British diplomat, who discovered it in 1765.

Intrigued by Caviglia’s ideas about the Great Pyramid, Vyse set up his own camp in a tomb close to the Great Pyramid and hired Caviglia to oversee hundreds of workmen clearing and exploring the monument. In time the Englishman and the Italian parted ways, and Vyse took complete control of pyramid explorations. He approached the task as would any good general. In the words of a contemporary, he “‘sat down before the Great Pyramid as a fortress to be besieged.’ ”
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After extensive and expensive excavation elsewhere in and around the Great Pyramid, Vyse turned some of his workmen to exploring an anomaly in Davison’s Chamber: a reed 3 feet long could be run up through a crack in the stone ceiling. Thinking that this curiosity might indicate an unknown chamber above, Vyse ordered his men to chisel through the granite. The stone proved too hard, however, and the chamber was too low to give them enough room to maneuver. Then the Englishman resorted to gunpowder. He blasted up through the softer, surrounding limestone until he discovered an unknown room atop Davison’s Chamber. Continuing his explosive upward journey, Vyse and his crew discovered three more layers of chambers and revealed the structure of the Relieving Chambers to the modern world. Vyse himself first posited the theory that the chambers had been built to alleviate the immense weight of rock bearing down on the King’s Chamber below.

What proved as interesting as the chambers themselves was a series of hieroglyphics, including cartouches crudely painted in red on the walls of the upper chambers. Vyse decided they were quarry marks that told workmen where to place the stones after they had been cut and shaped. Since one of the cartouches named Khufu explicitly, Vyse and others viewed them as proof that the Great Pyramid was indeed the work of the pharaoh Khufu, second monarch of the Old Kingdom’s Fourth Dynasty.

Not everyone is convinced of this fact, however. A number of writers have followed the lead of pyramidological gadfly Zecharia Sitchin in accusing Vyse of forgery. As they see it, the Englishman planted the marks to solidify his place in the annals of Egyptology.

I have never been persuaded by Sitchin’s scholarship—or, more accurately, his lack thereof—but I jumped at the chance to see the inscriptions for myself in late November 2003 and again in May 2004. Those examinations convinced me that the cartouches, including the one that spells out the name Khufu, are indeed ancient and not a forgery by a nineteenth-century English explorer, no matter how narcissistic or ambitious. Portions of the cartouches are obscured by incrustations, unlike the abundant nineteenth- and twentieth-century graffiti found in the Relieving Chambers. In addition, it is clear that some of the stones were marked before they were put into place, a sequence of events that rules out modern forgery. Most of the inscriptions are upside down, a peculiar orientation for forgeries. One runs upward before it is cut off by the chamber’s roofing blocks, while another runs downward before it is cut off by the chamber’s flooring blocks (which are actually the blocks making up the roof of the chamber below). In addition, the marks are crude, painted swiftly, most likely at the quarry where the stones were prepared.

Yet, given that the marks Vyse discovered are authentic, the critical question is What do they tell us? Only that the Great Pyramid from the Relieving Chambers up was the work of someone associated with Khufu.

Still, this may or may not have been the second pharaoh of the Old Kingdom’s Fourth Dynasty. Several of the cartouches, for example, read not “Khufu” but “Khnum-Khuf.” Khnum refers to the primal Egyptian god of creation, the deity later identified with Amon (also spelled Amun);
Khuf
is a variant spelling of
Khufu.
Why was Khufu associating himself with Amon? Is this a reference to a given individual king, or does it have something to do with the original religious mystery that underlies the pyramid itself?

In fact, the hieroglyphic cartouche for the name Khufu was a powerful charm found on any number of tombs and monuments throughout Egypt, many of them accurately dated to long after the Fourth Dynasty, some as late as a few centuries before Christ. The Khufu cartouche was used as a holy symbol in the same way that the cross was inscribed here, there, and everywhere by Christians in later centuries. The Relieving Chambers inscriptions don’t necessarily prove that Khufu built the Great Pyramid. They could mean that Khufu was himself named after the Great Pyramid, which existed before he did.

Support for this reverse order of events comes from the Inventory Stela, which was uncovered at Giza and dates from the sixth or seventh century B.C. According to the inscription on the stela, Khufu discovered and rebuilt an existing temple sacred to Isis, the great goddess of Egypt: “He [Khufu] found the House of Isis, mistress of the Pyramid, by the side of [the] cavity [house?] of the Sphinx, on the north-west of the House of Osiris [the great god of Egypt and Isis’s consort].”
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The inscription also suggests that a pyramid already stood on the site where Khufu built a pyramid for himself and another for Princess Henutsen, his wife. But which pyramid does the stela refer to—the Great Pyramid itself or one of the smaller pyramids close by, one of which was indeed intended for Princess Henutsen? If the inscription is correct, then, like the Great Sphinx, which certainly is, the Great Pyramid may also be older than Khufu.

Most Egyptologists dismiss the Inventory Stela as a Late Period forgery and refuse to take its redating of the standard story seriously. They are refusing to look seriously at several lines of evidence indicating that nothing at Giza is as simple as they want to believe.

Curious physical evidence relevant to the dating of the Great Pyramid comes from a carbon-14 study performed in the mid-1980s by the American Research Center in Egypt under the direction of prehistorian Robert J. Wenke of the University of Washington. Carbon-14 dating works only with organic materials and therefore cannot be used on stone. The cores of the pyramids, which are out of sight and less precisely fitted than the outer courses of stone, are held together with large amounts of mortar, which often contains charcoal, wood, and reed. The mortar, like stone, cannot be dated, but the organic material embedded in it can. Wenke’s team took mortar samples from the exteriors of all three Giza pyramids and the Sphinx Temple for testing at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (Federal Technical University) in Zurich, Switzerland.

The results were puzzling. Despite careful refinement and calibration, the samples averaged 374 years earlier than the accepted dates of the pharaohs with whom they were associated. Even more anomalous were the individual findings within single monuments. Two charcoal samples from an upper course in the Khufu pyramid dated to 3809 B.C., with a margin of error either way of 160 years. This means that the samples could date to as early as 3969 B.C. A wood sample from the same site, however, tested to 3101 B.C. (± 414 years). Another 13 samples, all but two of them charcoal, from lower in the Khufu pyramid spanned a range from 3090 to 2853 B.C., with a margin of error of between one and four centuries. Seven samples from the Khafre pyramid were dated to 3196-2723 B.C.; six from the Menkaure pyramid to 3076-2067 B.C.; and two from the Sphinx temple to 2746- 2085 B.C.